Launch HN: InpharmD (YC W21) – curated drug information for doctors
My name is Ashish, and I’m the CEO/ co founder of InpharmD (https://inpharmd.com). We take questions from doctors and return curated, evidence - based answers.
I was a clinical pharmacist offering a remote service from a University for 10 years. Ask us anything, we begged, and our team of pharmacists, residents, and students would look it up, get through the paywalls, and provide the answer.
I passed out business cards around local hospitals. They were lost over time.
Then I passed out business cards with magnets. They stuck around, but there aren’t that many places in the hospital with the magnetic surfaces.
Eventually, people stored our number, but we’d ask so many questions when they called, they couldn’t ask theirs: who are you, where are you calling from, what’s your email, spell it, etc, etc, etc. Often, they’d hang up on us, and I don’t blame them. The average doctor now sees five patients an hour.
I realized I wasn’t alone, and hundreds of other academicians, all leading their own teams, had the same problem. So, we formed a network and interviewed hundreds of our customers about how they’d ideally interact with us. What we needed to build was simple: one touch request.
My co - founder Tulasee built that and since, we learned that AI can transcribe PDFs faster (but not yet better) than our pharmacists. We started with 5,000 of our own study abstracts, assigned weights for corresponding content in their respective PDFs, and now we continuously reassign the weights until the algorithm can completely make our own abstracts. Our latest test revealed 94% accuracy against a matched human control, but with medical information, this will need to be 100% before we can rely on it.
We think Watson was a missed opportunity, so we called our algorithm Sherlock. We’re launching a partnership with the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists® (ASHP- https://ashp.org), using their database of 1,300 vetted drug monographs, so Sherlock can field questions at the point of care.
We’ve been fortunate to find early adopter health systems to pay for our service: WellStar, Ochsner, University of Maryland, Georgia DPH, and St Francis. We’re typically compared to the cost of their healthcare providers manually searching, and we end up cheaper.
We love this community and we’d welcome your ideas/ experiences/ feedback on what we’re building!